The semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) industry has experienced rapid growth. Technological advances in IC materials and design have produced generations of ICs. Each generation has smaller and more complex circuits than the previous generation. In the course of IC evolution, functional density (i.e., the number of interconnected devices per chip area) has generally increased while geometric size (i.e., the smallest component (or line) that can be created using a fabrication process) has decreased. This scaling-down process generally provides benefits by increasing production efficiency and lowering associated costs.
During the manufacturing of semiconductor devices, various processing steps are used to fabricate integrated circuits on a semiconductor wafer. Generally, the fabrication processes include deposition processes for forming various material layers over the semiconductor wafer. Since feature sizes continue to decrease, fabrication processes including the deposition processes continue to become more difficult to perform. Therefore, it is a challenge to deposit a material layer with a uniform thickness.
Although numerous improvements to the profile uniformity have been developed, they have not been entirely satisfactory in all respects. Consequently, it would be desirable to provide a solution to further improve the uniformity of a material layer that is formed using a deposition process.